Revision as of 02:19, 9 February 2011

Welcome to the BRL-CAD community publication portal. This page is dedicated to the preparation and editing of community publications for BRL-CAD. Proposed and upcoming publications are listed with their individual editorial status. You are welcome and encouraged to help share news about recent events or current activities taking place within the BRL-CAD community by writing an article. Community editing is welcome.

Ready for Publication

These are articles ready for publication. Release notes should follow a release and get published within the first week of the month. Other publications should be scheduled one or two weeks later, ideally on the third week of the month.

Note: if you see a comment indicating that a section is FROZEN, any changes you make in that section may go unnoticed as the article is being prepared for distribution. If you find errors in a FROZEN article, go ahead and correct the article but contact Sean (brlcad on freenode IRC) who may be able to incorporate changes during final publication.

Final Editorial Review

These should be "complete" articles. The author is done with the content and all that remains is a review of structure, grammar, voice, punctuation, and spelling. Images may be added as well.

Sean Morrison: Release 7.18.2

We are delighted to announce the availability of BRL-CAD 7.18.2! The biggest change provided in this release is initial support for reading some older (platform-dependent) binary v4 geometry database files regardless of their originating platform. While our current (platform-independent) v5 geometry file format has been the default since release 6.0 in 2002, there are numerous v4 files in prevalence that could only be read on a matching platform. Binary-incompatible v4 geometry database files can now be opened read-only within MGED where geometry can be inspected, drawn, exported via the "keep" command, and updated to the newer format via the "dbupgrade" command. In order to override the otherwise automatic binary-incomaptible v4 detection, MGED's "opendb" command provides a new -f flip option and all applications can override behavior with a LIBRT_V4FLIP environment variable.

MGED receives several changes in this release including fixing a bug that was causing text edit commands such as "ted" to fail. MGED will now also display attributes sorted by name for improved readability. Also introduced are numerous binary platform integration and usability enhancements for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux platforms. Included in Jordi Sayol's porting efforts are new desktop icons, menu items, mime-type association, and more. Other bug fixes, enhancements, and changes since release 7.18.0 include:

improved Fedora platform support with new menus, icons

fixed nirt units command reporting all units as invalid

dbupgrade support for binary-incompatible v4 files

new opendb -f endianness flip option for corrupt v4

new mime-type geometry association for Debian platform

improved Debian platform support with new menus, icons

improved mged 'ls' command support for v4 databases

dbconcat supports title, units, & color table import

'tree -a' command lists object attributes

fixed Mac build failure running asc2g before install

fixed g_diff color table difference false positive

fixed asc2g color table bug parsing 'color' lines

'attr show' command displays attributes sorted by name

fixed ted command to work using new editor support

fixed uninstalled text editor invocation bug in mged

support for comment lines at beginning of .asc files

disabled adrt_master and adrt_slave tools

ported pixblend image processing tool to Windows

upgraded libpng to version 1.4.5

upgraded zlib to version 1.2.5

removed shell execution ! command from vdeck

Special thanks go out to all of our contributors for this release including Jordi Sayol, John Anderson, Tom Browder, Daniel Roßberg, Erik Greenwald, Cliff Yapp, and Sean Morrison. This is a backwards-compatible release.

Kyle Bodt: Ronja

Ronja (Reasonable Optical Near Joint Access) is an innovative piece of equipment that utilizes reliable optical data links to create a current communication range of 1.4 km and a speed of 10Mbps full duplex that can be used as a general purpose wireless link for virtually any networking project. This is a very important project for Twibright Labs, a small group of computer science graduate students operating out of Charles University in Prague in the Czech Republic. The group specializes in the usage of Free Software and User Controlled Technology Development.

The primary output for the Ronja project is a design. The lab does not intend to manufacture and sell the hardware that is being designed but wants to engage in open source development of the technology. The philosophy surrounding User Controlled Technology is the ideal that the end-user is provided with unrestricted access to the intellectual property surrounding the technology, including the tools that are being used to create it. One tool playing an integral part in the development of the Ronja designs is BRL-CAD. All of the models that Twibright labs use to display the different variants of their Ronja concept were created with the help of BRL-CAD. BRL-CAD has allowed the members of Twibright labs to create instructional diagrams so that the users and builders of their open source technology will be able to have the latest information with regard to the proper construction of a Ronja unit. The interactive geometry editor and ray-tracers in BRL-CAD are an integral part in the communication of design plans for Twibright labs and enables them to connect with the users, who are the driving force behind the User Controlled Technology ideal.

Initial Drafts

These are incomplete articles being worked on. Most articles should be between 250 and 500 words (not counting tables, labels, and diagrams) before they have enough content to be considered complete.

Cliff Yapp: NURBS Ray Tracing in BRL-CAD

Over the past year, an intense development effort by BRL-CAD's development team has successfully implemented raytracing of Non-Uniform Rational BSpline (NURBS) geometry within the BRL-CAD Computer-Aided Design (CAD) package. NURBS surfaces are very general, very complex mathematical shapes used by virtually all modern commercial CAD software packages. Because BRL-CAD did not originally support this type of geometry, commercial models could only be imported into BRL-CAD after a labor-intensive and difficult conversion process from NURBS form to triangle-base geometry (referred to in BRL-CAD as Bags-of-Triangles or BoTs). The new NURBS raytracing capability builds on work by many developers over a period of years, who in turn built on the open source library OpenNURBS. Support for this primitive type means BRL-CAD can now store and raytrace data from commercial models without requiring preliminary conversion to another type of geometry.

The last major feature needed to make import of commercial models in BRL-CAD straightforward is conversion support for ISO’s "Standard for the Exchange of Product model data" or STEP file format. STEP uses NURBS geometry in its definition, making support for NURBS geometry a necessary prelude to support for STEP import. Most commercial CAD modelers support this file format as an output option, hence STEP support in BRL-CAD would allow a direct path for moving geometric descriptions from a variety of commercial modelers to BRL-CAD. Considerable progress has already been made on STEP import support, but more work is need to bring the code and feature set to "production quality". If anyone would like to join the BRL-CAD open source development effort and has a little familiarity with C++, the step-g converter and its supporting libraries have some simple-yet-useful tasks that would be an excellent and very useful way to explore the project - join BRL-CAD's IRC channel or development email list if you are interested!

Erik Greenwald: Bolting ADRT's libtie under the hood

BoT vs Tie pixdiff

Initial progress on the integration of ADRT's libtie "triangle intersection engine" with LIBRT.

Idea Hopper

These are ideas for interesting or useful publications. We need someone to at least write a draft.

Introduction to new .deb and .rpm builds

Brief article overviewing the efforts by jordisayol for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE. Included are new icons, menu items, mime type associations, and more.

2010 End Of Year Review

Article giving an overview of the past year's highlight developments with hints at what 2011 may bring. Alternatively, may be the annual statistics review if we switch from fiscal to calendar year reporting.

Erik Greenwald: ADRT/ISST Visualization

Article introducing ADRT/ISST core capability.

Bob Parker: Alpha Archer: Working Towards Next Generation MGED

Article introducing Archer's core new features that will be "coming" to MGED. Undo, interactive editing, tree view, and info panels come to mind.

Finding the Hot Spots

Article on the rt lighting model Stephen Kennedy developed that visualizes the time spent per-pixel.

Point Clouds

Article introducing the new point cloud primitive.

bn_mat_inv: singular matrix

Article on the v4 format and binary compatibility.

Model Showcase: Goliath

Article talking about the making of the Goliath model.

Model Showcase: Chumaciera

Article on Pedro Baptista's bearing model.

Model Showcase: Proyecto Catapulta

Article on a model developed by André Santos, António Almeida, and Pedro Ferreira.

Model Showcase: Union Coupling Tool

Article on a model developed by Inês de Matos under teacher Luís Ferreira. The project focuses on a tool, union coupling, based on the book, http://purl.pt/14352 , page 122 of the original book and page 128 of the file, figures 108 and 109.

Geometry Service FAQ

FAQ summarization of the GS as it pertains to the wider open source community.